Teaching Philosophy

Learning is enhanced by participatory, hands-on, and place-based approaches. I seek to connect my students not only to the materials we study but also to the land upon which we depend.

Teaching Practice

With the end production goal being a musical performance on stage in Orvis Auditorium, MUS311Q students learn Thai music by studying materials, mechanics of sound production, and the physical structure of instruments. Other ensembles hand out instruments and sheet music on day 1, but MUS311Q students begin with a tour of our department’s Asia-Pacific Instrument collection to get a sense of the materials and construction methods used in Southeast Asian instruments. After this overview, we set out (with proper permissions and cultural protocol) to scavenge materials from campus grounds (bamboo), assign students to bring items from home for repurposing (tin cans and boba straws), reach out to community partners (e.g., rice bags from Bangkok Chef, bike brakes from McCully Bike Shop), and brainstorm other ways to divert materials otherwise destined for the landfill. My students get very creative and start paying new attention to trash and consumption habits. I remember the excitement of a student’s email informing me that a Buddhist temple in her neighborhood was being renovated. She came to class with a bag of roof shingles to use in the fiddles we were making.

Supplied with discards, we devote significant classroom time to building: flutes made from boba straws and PCV pipes, gong racks from tin cans, harps and fiddles using cookie tins and bike brake cables. The bulk of hands-on activities allow for informal discussion on cultural practices, histories, acoustics, sound mechanics, and political contexts in which these musics are produced.

For example, the Karen (indigenous stateless population living in Thailand and Burma) play a harp called tehnaku, which is built (nowadays) using gas containers and bike brake cables. The physical makeup of the instrument parallels the story of an isolated population being folded into state contact and civilization/assimilation programs. Technologies of “uplift” are imposed upon Karen villages and eventually break down or are abandoned, their technology stripped for parts and repurposed by the locals. The harp mirrors the same ingenuity and has become an iconic symbol of indigenous resilience amidst a growing human rights crisis taking place in Thai national parks (where ancestral lands are designated as nature preserves, resulting in state-led evictions of the “squatters”). Such contexts add depth to the music, lyrics, and building process that performance rehearsals alone miss.

Accompanying the building process are handouts, explanatory guides, audio recordings, and tutorial videos that I make available on laulima but also on my Instagram hashtag #MUS311. These resource materials ground the class in pedagogy and offer students (many of whom are interested in music education) to have future resources to draw upon later.

One of the main challenges in building instruments for ensemble usage is in ensuring quality control. As we focus on one new instrument each week from one of four taxonomical categories, I do some advanced prep (finger holes for a flute, for example, must be precisely measured; and some of the more tool-heavy construction I do at home). Even with these measures, there are some instruments that don’t hold up, or some that aren’t appropriately in tune with others, and some that just end up not working for our purposes. The course thus becomes more a thematic and culturally-situated exploration each week, with the best and most fitting instruments becoming the final ones we work with for our performance. While I am frustrated at my failed attempts, I use these as lessons for discussing and refining each successive lesson and semester, inviting students to critically analyze and propose solutions based on our mutually growing knowledge gained.

Impact

MUS311 is an innovative 1-credit musical ensemble that allows students to gain applied skills in musical performance and craftsmanship while engaging innovatively with the fields of organology, ecomusicology, and ethnomusicology. For MUS311, our students take part in finding discarded materials, discussing their acoustic properties, researching existing musical instruments from the tradition, and fashioning rubbish into workable instruments in class.

No prerequisite musical or cultural experience is required of the department’s Asia- Pacific focused ensembles, but students are expected to participate in an end-of-semester showcase of performative achievement in the department-sponsored “Pau Hana Concert.” Thus, the musical objectives are weighted a bit more heavily over the cultural goals, which include:

1. Learning vocalization techniques & Thai pronunciation
2. Competency playing various percussion instruments 
3. Competency playing various melodic instruments
4. Conducting oneself professionally on-stage (presentational/performative mastery)
5. Learning basic instrument construction and 4 categories of musical instruments
6. Cultural Competency specific to the performative musical tradition.

Each of the above categorial competencies are broken into four levels of mastery (basic, intermediate, advanced, and superior), and are evaluated dialogically in real time during in-class hands-on activities (construction, discussion, sectional rehearsals, full-ensemble rehearsals). Applied lessons prepare students for the final ensemble performance on Orvis Auditorium stage.

As an example of the criteria, a student might demonstrate advanced competency in language/vocalization with a vocal contribution to all three of the prepared songs for the concert (see the student to the right in this recording from our SP2023 concert). In that same video, the two students on the left side of the screen demonstrate intermediate competency in the instrumental category as each are able to play two different melodic instruments satisfactorily.

For the SP2023 iteration of MUS311, 100% of the students achieved the baseline goal (basic competency in all areas). Beyond this, each student was able to specialize in a category of their choosing (instrumental, percussive, vocal), achieving intermediate proficiency in their chosen category. In the less-weighted categories (crafting and culture), half of the class achieved basic proficiency while the rest exceeded. 

Feedback to the public performance was positive. Attendees approached to marvel at the instruments created, seeking verification that our claims (repurposing rubbish in class!) were true. Many asked about signing up, about taking the show to the community. Teachers from nearby public schools inquired about workshops and collaborations. My students have also taken the course ideals in new directions, too, including the vocalist in the video above, who has turned content of our class into a full play for young audiences as her MFA thesis and taken the show on tour to local schools, libraries, and community venues.

Through its innovative approach, MUS311 (Thai Ensemble) is helping to connect students to the physical campus and community surrounding UH by exploring music, material, sustainability, and culture.